a changed perspective
by Devi Lethe
Summary: She's waited a century to hear two words again, and he doesn't disappoint. "Hello, sweetheart." AU After 3 x 21.
1. Chapter 1

They kill him. She throws a party. Something inside goes cold and dead. It might be her humanity. Ha. Ha.

Maybe she should feel terrible about what she does next, but somehow she doesn't. Things change, and she isn't the one responsible for changing them. Amazing what extremity can do to one's priorities.

She follows the brothers, waiting for them to split up, and once she's snapped both their necks, she just takes him. It's so obscenely easy she almost feels guilty, like this has all been a game and she's cheating, but then she remembers they held him down and stopped his heart and she's all of the sudden fighting the urge to kick them while they're down for the satisfaction of feeling something shatter under her hands.

It's a tight moment, but she leaves them unharmed. It's not worth the risk to him. Alaric is still out there.

She always was good at letting things go.

For once she gets to make a decision that will alter the course of their lives forever. Hopefully he'll understand, but if not, that's all right, too. She gets it now that love really is selfish.

He weighs nothing slung over her shoulder, rolled up in a carpet like Rasputin and just as "dead," but he isn't going in any river. No, he goes in the last place anyone would ever think to look: under her house. She tunnels down through her mother's garden, makes it look as though a dog ripped into it. (She might have had a bit too much fun fabricating evidence.) It works. No one even blinks at the smell of turned earth.

She waits. Her numbness recedes just enough that she knows she hasn't accidentally flipped the switch, but it doesn't go far.

Eternity changes one's perspective on time.

Everyone loses their damned minds, naturally. There is massive hysteria for the next six months as everyone wonders where he went, who has him, whether he's been revived. The Salvatores go Original hunting, the Originals go batshit psychotic (specifically Kol and Rebekah) and almost kill everyone (again). And Caroline… Well, she gets to be honest, for once, and rails at both sides for their idiocy, something she's been wanting to do for months and she and Rebekah knock down several walls in the mansion when the issue comes to a head.

Stefan tries to break things up so Caroline puts him through a window. Damon gets tossed into various pieces of furniture by Kol, just because. Elijah makes a drink and waits, because he has the good sense not to get involved in what is clearly a private dispute between two very angry, very lethal vampires.

It's surprisingly cathartic to hurt someone without compunction, and Rebekah isn't really trying to kill her. By the time they're finished, Rebekah has an entirely valid excuse to redecorate and Caroline actually does feels a little better. Stefan looks at her with a wary caution that isn't unfamiliar. She's seen that look before.

No one exchanges terms, but there is a cease fire (kind of) and she has somehow become a neutral party. It isn't as daunting as it should be. She's not baby vampire Caroline anymore. Together, they manage to desiccate Alaric, and put him in one of the coffins. Esther goes in another. Ric is buried unofficially next to Jenna, and Elijah, being the only halfway sane sibling left, takes his mother away somewhere. Caroline isn't sure where, but it really doesn't matter. No one will be opening that box again.

She lets Tyler down gently when the smoke has cleared.

"Is it because of him?" he asks.

And she answers honestly when she says no. It's not because of him that she can't be satisfied with a small town life. He can hardly be blamed because he was right.

A year passes. Two. She goes to George Mason, and lets it be known her mother has cancer. No one questions her motives. It's not a lie so much as a convenient truth and she reviles herself for thinking that, but loss has given her a kind of awful clarity. She doesn't bother lying about who she is anymore, not to herself.

Elena chooses Damon (which everyone saw coming), and decides to have a child before being turned. Damon doesn't seem to mind. She picks a sperm donor with his features, and names their boy Alaric Grayson Salvatore. She turns on her twenty-fifth birthday, and pretends not to wonder if Klaus will spring from the nearest shadow to dismember her. Jeremy stays in Denver and Elena is happy but doesn't understand. She never was good at understanding people.

Bonnie goes to VTech, and meets someone normal. They have three children before it ends in a messy divorce. She doesn't remarry, and when she calls Caroline, something that might be a close cousin to remorse is in her voice. Her children don't understand why their mother is friends with a vampire, but they don't have to. Bonnie gets that now, too.

Matt moves to Seattle for school and never really comes back except for scattered visits. It's good, mostly. At least he gets to have a normal life. If anyone deserves a happily ever after, it's Matt.

Elijah comes and goes. Caroline is never quite sure whether he suspects the truth but he doesn't act on it if he does, and she's glad of the company. Rebekah and Kol leave town, headed for Europe. Stefan goes with them. Caroline is left with a standing invitation to join if the mood strikes her, but she can't leave yet. Things aren't finished and Stefan seems vaguely relieved when she declines.

It's a little more hurtful than she thought it would be, and a lot less meaningful, which probably says more about who she's becoming than she ever could. For months and years, she agonizes over whether that matters, but never does manage to decide.

That first decade is the hardest. She takes up gardening because of all the times she finds herself knee deep in the earth and prepared to wake him, half mad with the urge to see him, to touch his skin. She spends hours wracked with guilt as she contemplates what she's doing, and who she's doing it for. All the people he's killed, and will kill, and her responsibility for what will happen when it's her hand that brings him back.

More than once she has her phone out, finger hovering over the speed dial to call someone, anyone, so she can confess. Sometimes the phone goes back in her pocket. Sometimes it ends up shattered against the nearest hard surface, or crushed in her shaking hands, or thrown in a lake, or the nearest fireplace, or the trash compactor, twice. (That guy at verizon must think she's the most enormous klutz.)

Every year her flower bed gets a little bigger, a little more grandiose. Call it a coping mechanism. Caroline Forbes has a plan and it's a good one, but only if she keeps it together.

Her mother goes through three remissions, some of which may have been assisted by vampiric healing, and dies peacefully, compelled in the last week to feel no pain. Caroline can't feel bad about that either. Liz gets a quarter page obituary in the local paper. The council suggests it might be time for her to move on, but Caroline ignores them with the kind of casual indifference that scares them most. She can see now how small and petty a threat they really are. Leaderless, shaken after the disappearance of Alaric and the defection of the Lockwoods and her mother. It's laughably easy to push them around.

Because Caroline could level this town in a single night, wipe it off the face of the earth with a few phone calls to a few choice friends. She could have every man, woman, and child inside the city limits killed and salt the earth for good measure, but she won't because she's just not ready to commit a private genocide. (She's petrified there might be a 'yet' at the end of that sentence. She lets them see that, too.) They cave, naturally. The council doesn't want a war and the name "Caroline Forbes" can't be spoken anymore without the word "Original" close behind.

Caroline still can't leave. It's been twenty years, and time is beginning not to matter as much. It's just a stopwatch running down, counting the days, months, years until she can see him. What would he think of her self-imposed hibernation? Would he be flattered? Angry? Disappointed?

Her mother was, but then, Liz didn't understand. No one does. Except maybe him. He daggered his family and carted them around the world for ages to keep them safe. She only has to wait a lifetime. One, maybe two, at the outside. Not long at all, if you think about it. Caroline Forbes can be patient. She can.

It's just lonelier than she expected.

Everyone comes back for her mother's funeral. Half the mourners watch from the treeline, but not Caroline. She's the open secret of Mystic Falls, the question no one ever asks. In the end she's no different than the animal attacks. Everyone takes her at face value because no one really wants to know, not even the ones who do.

It's fifty years before she finally learns to feed in moderation, honing her skill at compulsion, sending them on their way none the wiser. He was wrong about one thing. It wouldn't have taken her a century to come around. She's barely been alive half that long and already transgressions are starting to seem smaller. It isn't that she doesn't care, it's just that she's gotten more selective.

Even to her it sounds like a rationalization.

Some lines she refuses to cross, like murdering her victims, but her reasons aren't entirely based on morals. Part of it is that she can't afford to draw that kind of attention. She doesn't want to deal with the hassle of having to move, relocate his body and cover their tracks. Part of it is pride. She's not some hapless infant. She's Caroline Forbes, former Miss Mystic Falls, virtuoso vampire, friend to the Original family. She's better than that.

The trade off is that she's so much less than the idealistic, hopeful girl he used to know. Would he look at her now and still tell her she's full of light? She doesn't feel it, but then, she never did.

The council does her a favor and changes her records. On paper, she's Caroline Forbes, granddaughter of Sheriff Forbes. Seventeen all over again. It's been six decades and she's still stuck in a filler year. Nothing has changed but her point of view. He would like that, she's sure, and she has a little laugh without him. A little drink, too. (Okay, not so little.)

She waits. It gets easier all the time. She suspects that's because she has a purpose. Maybe that's why he had to make his hybrids, why he couldn't let it go. Even a terrible purpose must be better than no purpose at all. That doesn't bother her as much as it should, either.

At seventy two, Bonnie dies of her third stroke. Caroline compels her way in to see her friend on her deathbed. She's gotten quite good at that. She holds Bonnie's hand one more time, and wishes her friend a good journey. Bonnie deserves her rest.

Her grandchildren all stare, their eyes full of cautious admiration and something else that's closer to disgust.

It's not unfamiliar to her. Her friends never did manage to understand.

Jeremy lives to be eighty six, and Elena loses it for a few years. She and Damon move to Australia, which is just about the farthest place they can go, and ask Caroline to keep an eye on their son and his family. It's not a problem, she tells them, and it really isn't. She was doing it already.

She definitely feels a little bad about that, but it's going to be necessary, and soon, and that outweighs what's left of her reservations.

It's been eighty years, and she's still waiting. But not for long.

When she gets the news that Elena's son and his wife have died in a car accident, she starts making plans. She buys a house, and an Aston Martin, and applies for a passport. At the end of the year, she calls Elijah.

"I'm going to Alaska," she says, without preamble, and if he didn't know before he certainly does now, but he doesn't question it. He trusts her, in his way, at least where his family is concerned. "Will you come back?"

"Of course. Where are they?" And she rattles off the home addresses of Elena's grandchildren without so much as a tremor in her voice. She doesn't feel remorse, but then, a new kind of numbness has settled over her, and each second is its own eternity. It's as though all the time that slipped past her has just been waiting to fill the seven days it takes to drive to Anchorage. (She wants a little distance, just in case.)

He weighs less than nothing when she digs him up, like picking up a tissue and she gets it why he always handled her as though she might break. She makes two stops to feed, and one to pick up blood after she's crossed into Alaska. He's going to be hungry, and she needs to be prepared.

Her house is an hour outside the city, and she had it furnished in her absence by a designer she hired on Rebekah's recommendation. Say what you like about the woman's character, she has good taste.

It feels a little odd, but she settles on the basement as ideal. This will very likely be messy. Running through the excitement and the hope, a tendril of fear tries to pluck at her, the ghost of her childhood insecurities. It's much too late for that now, though, and so she sets out the blood bags, and rolls up her sleeves. Quickly, neatly, she slices her palm open with a wooden blade, and then reaches down, into his flesh, and grasps his desiccated heart.

Her other wrist is pressed to his mouth, waiting, ready, the blood inside him spreading, spilling, reviving the dried out muscle. And then she begins to squeeze in a strange mimicry of life, careful not to use too much force. She coaxes his flesh into remembering that it can't die, that it can't be stopped by anything so simple as starvation.

She waits, reopening the cut in her hand three times before she feels what she was waiting for all this time, what all those years have been preparation for: the expansion of his chest as he sucks in a painful breath, and then only a second later, his arms latching onto her wrist as he buries his fangs in her flesh.

She learns what it feels like to give someone back a life you took away.

He's squeezing so tightly he's fractured her wrist, but she doesn't mind. She pulls her hand out of his chest and opens a blood bag for herself to stop him from draining her dry, putting his head in her lap and stroking his hair as he savages the skin of her arm, whispering, "Easy, easy. It's all right. I've got you."

When she's had three blood bags and he looks almost alive again, he lets her go and opens one himself.

His eyes are still closed, his body still desperately trying to replenish itself. She waits, but this time there is no numbness to slow or hurry the passing of time. At the first touch of his lips she felt it vanish and in its place is a bubbling, champagne hope she hasn't felt since he saved her from his own whim a lifetime ago.

When he drains the fifth bag, he lets his arm fall back to his stomach, covering the place his friend betrayed him, the place where she revived him. His eyes open and fix on her without hesitation, a smile she still hasn't managed to forget quirking his lips.

She's waited a century to hear two words again, and he doesn't disappoint.

"Hello, sweetheart."

She can feel herself grinning like an idiot but can't manage to care. Even if he hates her for a century or two, she can be patient. She tells him what year it is, and his eyes go dark, but he can wait, too, and he does, listening to her story.

She tells him about stealing his body, about burying him under her house and keeping him hidden. She tells him about killing Alaric and preserving Esther and about waiting for all the people she didn't want him to kill to die in their own time. She tells him about Elena's son, and how she's kept track of the bloodline, and reassures him that Elijah is watching the family in her absence.

He listens, playing with her fingers in a very, very distracting way, expression unreadable. When she's finished, he places a kiss on her knuckles, genuine mirth playing across his features. She could wait, but the look in his eyes says she might not have to.

He rolls up his sleeve in turn, offering her his wrist. "Better drink up, sweetheart. I was a bit rough." She wonders how many people he's granted this privilege, and then doesn't think anything as the taste of him floods her senses. She remembers this. Love and hate and sun and earth and _life_.

Life. That's what she's been waiting for all these years. She presses her lips against his flesh before she pulls away, and when she looks again his eyes have gone dark for entirely different reasons.

He brushes a thumb across her lip. It comes away red. It's probably a bad idea but she can't find it in herself to regret the fact that her tongue darts out to lick it off.

He stops, his eyes caught on hers and she savors the myriad emotions that flash across his face. Vague surprise, calculation, victory, success. But he hesitates. It's not like him to hesitate. He should be taking full advantage, that calculation played out to its fullest extent. (His affection will never be a simple thing.)

Instead, he does something really, truly surprising. He gives her an out.

In a despairing kind of growl as he says, "Caroline… We have time. Nothing has to change now."

She isn't wrong when she thinks it means some part of him really does care.

She laughs, a delicious sense of irony adding a gorgeous edge to everything. "Everything has changed, Niklaus."

"I haven't." That much is true. He's still the same man who hunted them like animals, who compelled her ex-boyfriend to bite her and then absolved her of the consequence, who wanted to keep her friend in a living hell as a constant blood donor, still the man who kills carelessly and without remorse. None of that has changed.

The difference is with her. She's become the woman who can wait for her friends to die because it's the easiest option, who can let Elena Gilbert bear a child without telling her that the monster she fears is still a reality. Caroline can be the instrument of that reality and consider the betrayal collateral damage.

She's become the woman who looks at Niklaus Mikaelson and sees a person.

"I have." And she closes the last distance between them. It's the farthest she's ever had to go, and the closest to something like home. She thinks _Finally_ and _Already?_ and _Yes_.

His arms wrap around her waist and her hands tangle in his hair and the world he promised her so long ago is here.

It's been waiting, too.


	2. Chapter 2

They stay a couple weeks in Alaska, an idyll of sorts before they have to return to the real world. They talk, with and about one another. It's bliss to simply exist in the other's presence, without distractions or outside obligations. Not that they've forgone the outside concerns. Neither of them can ignore that eventuality, but they can set it aside.

She understands how he could dance and court her at a ball thrown by his murderous mother. She also realizes this is the skill that lets her consider people as acceptable losses, but there's really no going back from a shift in worldview.

She isn't sure what it says about her that she doesn't try.

He isn't angry she waited to revive him. If anything, he seems pleased. That takes longer to puzzle out, but eventually she realizes he's touched she's gone to such lengths for him. For Klaus, time is the ultimate test of affection and while a century doesn't say endless devotion, it does say, "I care." A little ruthlessness only adds verisimilitude. He can't understand a love that's devoid of selfishness, if there is such a thing.

Besides his family, when was the last time anyone had done so much?

They even speak a little about the future. He makes it perfectly clear there will be no happy reunions with Elena or the Salvatores any time soon. That's so far down the list of problems it doesn't even bother her. They've got time, and Elena will no doubt be horrified at the idea of Caroline throwing caution to the wind for _her_heart. But Elena is still her friend, or she's still Elena's, and she very tactfully suggests that with the next doppelganger, they try asking nicely since no one will have to die.

He doesn't agree but doesn't dismiss it, either, and that's enough for right now. She's had a long time to consider her options and despite being a psychopath he's also results oriented. There are at least four centuries between them and that eventuality, anyway. It's no rush.

They go back to Mystic Falls, taking considerably longer on the drive back to see the sights. He hasn't forgotten his promise even if she didn't show up on his doorstep, but he has to be sure things there are in order, has to see for himself that his dream is intact.

She's not unfamiliar. She did choose to bury him under her house, after all.

Elijah greets them at the door of the mansion, a sort of wry smile on his face and a fire burning behind him. It's all very dramatic and she'd suspect him of staging the scene if he weren't so damned stoic.

A thousand years and all of them still prefer the heat of an open flame. What piece of home will she be desperately clinging to in her time? Klaus? Somehow it's not the pleasant thought she anticipated. (That kind of need scares her.)

Later, Elijah pulls her aside, outside the range of Klaus's hearing, looking grim and utterly reasonable. He doesn't waste words, but then, he usually doesn't. Not with her. Not anymore. They aren't so very different, either.

He says, "It won't go smoothly, you know. My brother is who he is."

And she really wants to be annoyed, to get frustrated and walk away from his obvious, pedantic little lecture. She's better than that, though, so she marshals her patience and looks at him, really looks, because Elijah _doesn't_waste words, so he's saying this for a reason. His face was never exactly readable, but there's something... something leading. Something concerned.

"You're afraid I'm going to hurt him?" He doesn't answer, because she's still forging ahead, coming to a far more realistic perspective, and he'll wait. He has time "No. You're afraid of the fallout if I do."

Graciously, he has the courtesy to provide a guilty smirk. Elijah's honesty is always deliberate, something considering and then allocated. It's also potentially revocable upon further consideration. Or more specifically, ignorable. With Klaus it's anyone he doesn't care about, with Rebekah it's just about everything, with Elijah, it's his morals. Collateral damage.

Maybe everything eventually comes down to a compromise when you're stuck with eternity.

"Can you blame me?"

After a brief moment of consideration, she answers honestly, "Yes."

The callous little laugh pops out of him and it's one she hasn't heard before, not from him. Even he seems kind of surprised. "Perhaps it'll go more smoothly than I thought."

She can't decide if she's being insulted, but is it really such a bad thing to be conclusively oneself? If there is a definitive answer to that, she certainly doesn't have it.

Klaus appears behind her with a speed she should be accustomed to but isn't, his arms slipping casually around her waist with a possessiveness she's already come to expect. "Everything all right, love?"

"Everything's fine." And it is. Everything is fine.

The family he places under watch after a week spent reminding his people just how beneficial loyalty can be. It only takes five examples. The knowledge that she did that, that she's responsible, sits in her chest. She waits for the guilt to hit her, to be reduced to tears and regret at the thought of what's happened, but it doesn't come, and that makes her a little sick. It _should _matter. It is significant that five people are dead. So why doesn't she care?

She drinks from a blood bag that night just to feel closer to the girl she used to be and when he slips into bed with her, a bed they now share, it seems worth even that price to have him back, to have made her choices. She's almost sure she'd make them again if she had the chance.

She lets that sense of uncertainty go, too.

They meet Rebekah and Kol in Buenos Aires, sans Stefan, and it's all pretty ghastly with Rebekah swearing at Caroline in a fit of misplaced guilt, Kol making it so much worse than it had to be by egging his sister on and Klaus threatening to dagger him for another century if he can't shut up.

She finds herself in the living room of their home staring into the fire, her head aching with the aftermath of that confrontation, when Kol strolls in with a bottle of vodka and two glasses. She's never been more fond of him.

They each knock back their first drink in silence, and their second, but on the third he pauses, his smile a bizarre mixture of gratitude and sneer. "You just managed to resurrect the biggest pain in the ass this world has ever known."

"Second only to you," she agrees. "Top that off, please. I'm not nearly drunk enough."

He fills her glass, but stares into his own with a look on his face she's only seen once before. It makes him look so young. "I really thought we'd gotten rid of him."

"No thanks to you," Rebekah snarls, hatred rolling off her in palpable waves. It vaguely occurs to Caroline that she ought to be afraid, surrounded by Originals, at least one of whom is murderously angry, but all she feels is a kind of vague annoyance with Rebekah for being so irrational.

It's profoundly odd and distinctly funny, so she laughs. In retrospect, she recognizes this as a bad idea but at the time it seems perfectly reasonable. Between the three of them, they demolish half the house before Klaus comes back to separate them like scolded children.

He glares at his siblings and checks her over for injuries with gentle hands. In a clinical, detached voice, he asks, "Have you taken leave of your senses?"

She sighs, thinking of Mystic Falls. "We weren't really trying to kill each other."

Kol toasts them with the miraculously unharmed bottle of vodka. "Obviously. You're not dead."

"Thank you, Kol, that's very helpful." She rolls her eyes at him and he smirks under the attention, but even Klaus is smiling a little as he brushes his thumb across her cheek. "Just a spat," she says, and knows she's pouting a little, but can't seem to stop.

And that half smile she loves so much is back when his hand moves from her face to her neck, tangling in her hair. "Love, I'd hate to see you have a fight."

It doesn't occur to her until later that he should have been angry - furious, really - with her and them, and that the only reason he isn't is because he believes them. He believes they were just blowing off steam using each other as punching bags/wrecking balls.

Kol, oddly enough, is the one who gives her a little insight on it as he playfully tosses a chunk of concrete in her direction. "Welcome to the family, love."

Rebekah ignores her beautifully whenever possible, but there's no true anger in it. It's the sullen, stubborn silence of a bratty child, and by the time they move the following year, she even deigns to ask Caroline for help getting her room in order. It's about as close to an apology as the Originals ever give.

Caroline accepts, because she's nice like that.

She learns Spanish, or at least, she learns the Argentine equivalent of Spanish, and Klaus teaches her some Lunfrado, but not much. It's fallen out of favor since he was last there. They go dancing every night, sometimes in Recoleta, or Puerto Madero, but she falls in love with San Telmo.

Stefan shows up at their door three months later, and fortunately for him she is the one who answers. They stare at one another for a solid minute before either of them speaks.

"I'm sure I don't need to tell you how massively stupid this is." She studies him, looking for a hint of what he hopes to accomplish.

He chuckles darkly, a kind of self-deprecating mirth dripping from the sound. "No," he agrees. "You don't." He always did have that brooding thing going for him.

Once she would have tried to rush him away from the house, tried to convince him to hide until they could figure something out, to save him at any and all costs from the clutches of her monster.

Once.

No longer. He's allowed to make his own choices, just like she did.

She knows, then, why he's there. It's not a realization. It's a change in perspective. She says, "I'll get her."

Sheer surprise prompts him to meet her gaze directly, his own strangely vulnerable. He swallows thickly, voice gone husky with emotion, and manages, "Thank you."

Ironically, there is no irony in what she says next. "What are friends for? Wait here." In the den, she tosses Rebekah a look she hopes is meaningful. "It's for you."

Klaus is mildly perplexed but doesn't protest as she slides onto his lap, her arms going around his neck as his encircle her waist. He asks, "Something wrong, sweetheart?"

And Caroline sighs, resting her head on his shoulder. She had known this moment would come, or one just like it. One day she'd have to choose whether or not to stand between him and those he intended to harm. But now that it's there she's realizing she made her choice already, from the moment she reached into his chest and touched his heart.

She had always known she'd have to face the consequence of that choice sooner or later. Although she'd hoped for later, all that waiting had served another purpose. It had given her time to think. "My friends are idiots," she says after a pause that's just a tiny bit too long.

In the span of time it takes her to meet his eyes they've gone dark with the cold sort of fury she knows is his worst, the veins dancing under his skin at the very thought of a Salvatore in his home. It says a good deal about both of them that his grip on her doesn't change and that she doesn't flinch away. That anger, it isn't for her.

She brushes a thumb across his cheek, asking him to look at her. He does, the tension in his every muscle apparent in the set of his neck. "He was your friend, too, once. He's still mine. Don't kill him." It's an entreaty, not an order, and then as smoothly as she slid against him, she lets him go, slithering impossibly back out of the chair the way she came in. He's gone before she's upright, and judging by the thud from the hall, she knows exactly where he went.

Rebekah is screaming at him in Russian, which she only does when she's very, very upset, and Stefan is pinned against the wall by his neck, Klaus holding him nearly a foot off the ground.

"I should kill you where you stand for having the gall to come knocking at my door."

Using the breath he still has, Stefan manages to choke out, "Surprised you haven't."

Klaus grits his teeth, and brings his face dangerously close to Stefan's throat. "It's not for lack of desire, I assure you." In what might be the most awkward moment of her immortality, no one looks at her.

Without warning, he drops Stefan, using way more force than necessary.

(Caroline can hear femurs snap. Drop probably isn't the right term. In a weird moment of mental slippage, she wishes Elijah were there. He could probably tell her what the right word for it is.)

Klaus straightens up and waits until Stefan is facing him to go on. "Caroline doesn't want me to kill you. It seems neither does, Bekah. You might think to be grateful."

Quick as a snake, quicker even, Klaus lashes out, his hand sinking into Stefan's chest, and Rebekah is screaming all over again, but not moving. None of them are moving, not even Kol, and if Caroline had a steady heartbeat it would be lurching. Stefan is staring at nothing, his focus turned in, toward the horrifying sensation, and Klaus... Klaus is calm.

He says, "It's a very unique feeling, isn't it? Sure, there's the physical pain, and the panic, but mostly it's the betrayal of knowing your friend's hand is buried in your chest, holding your heart."

When he lets go he stalks away without a backwards glance, leaving Rebekah to catch Stefan as he falls, to give him her blood. Not for the first time, Caroline wonders what happened in Europe, but it isn't really important. Whatever it was, it was enough for Stefan to come back and that says everything.

She gives Klaus a few hours to cool off. In the study, he's gone through half a bottle of bourbon and tosses her a vicious glare when she sticks her head in Expecting her to be judgmental, no doubt. She can't suppress the flash of annoyance that he doesn't realize she's not the same person, but she tries to remember old habits die hard. He's only had a few years to get to know her again.

Maybe that's why he's closer to Rebekah and Kol. Now he knows what it feels like to lose a century. It fits their sense of honor. An eye for an eye.

He's caught completely off guard when she throws her arms around him, her face pressed into his shirt, and says, "Thank you." Into the stunned silence, she goes on. "You could have killed him, but you didn't, so thank you. I know it wasn't just for me, but I'm grateful and I wanted you to know that."

Slowly, carefully, he folds his arms around her as well, presses his face into her hair. For a long time they just stand together, holding one another. When he does speak it's so low she almost misses it, even with her hearing. "It wasn't worth it." In his voice she hears a grief she doesn't understand.

"Nik?"

He lets her pull away far enough to meet her eyes. His face is carefully blank, but in his eyes she can see fear. "I wasn't sure you'd forgive me. If I killed him. I had his heart in my hand, my revenge, and all I could think about was whether you'd be able to look at me the same way if I took it."

It cuts deeper than she thought it would, that grief, and she hates the little tremor in her voice when she says, "You make it sound like a bad thing."

The arm around her waist pulls tighter, pressing her hips flush with his. "It's terrifying. I'm not used to having something to lose, Caroline."

And there are no words to fix that for him. She doesn't bother trying to find them. Instead, she presses her lips against his, fiercely, a little desperately, and he answers it, every lick and nip. She might have been the one to start it, but he's the one whose tongue delves past her lips, whose hands are already sliding under her shirt, across her back. Those are his lips leaving a trail like fire down her neck, against her threading pulse.

She stops trying to keep up with him, stops trying to respond to his every attention and lets the pleasure wash over her. When he slides a hand between her thighs, she kisses his neck. When he pushes into her she drives her nails into his shoulders, because she wasn't quite ready, but couldn't stand to wait. And sometime between him sinking into the wet heat of her and the moment when she falls into the abyss, she knows that she would have forgiven him if he had ripped out her friend's heart because she knows exactly what it's like to be alone.


End file.
